CALL ME SNAKE

My cousin and his daughter visited us this weekend from southern California. Feeling bad about the fact that we had three straight days of rain here in Boston, I told him that before that we had an almost unbelievable stretch of nearly two weeks without any rain. My cousin was not impressed. “Two weeks between rainstorms?” he scoffed. “That’s the rainy season for us.

Tonight’s debate was hard to get through; a bit of a snoozer, you might say. I was ready to turn it off early in the proceedings. Just one thing kept me going: I watched in the hopes that McCain might have a senior moment. But it seems he forgot to have one.

Just to set the record straight: John McCain is not a chicken. (Nor is he a pig with lipstick.) It’s just that there are more important things facing the nation right now than debates. There’s the financial problem for one thing, and McCain claims to be dropping everything–including his campaign–to fix it. (Or is he trying to fix his campaign?) The thing is, McCain is one of the people who helped create the financial mess we’re now in. So the job he’s now assumed is clear: He wants to take this huge problem, that is partly of his own making, and make it worse.

SIGMUND FREUD has fallen out of favor but he still stands as one of the great geniuses of the past century or so. Freud said [wisely] that when it comes to the small things in life, we should think carefully. When it comes to the big things–like whether you should marry so and so–we shouldn’t think at all; we should just trust our instincts. Maybe people aren’t buying some of his theories these days (such as “penis envy”), but some of this guy’s ideas still rock. You go, boy!

Today my family and I hiked up a beautiful mountain on a beautiful day and there was nothing to complain about. I admitted to my wife afterwards that I was embarrassed to say that I had more fun on the day a few weeks back when we took the kids to an amusement park. But my disclaimer was not sufficient. She shushed me, saying: “I don’t want the kids hearing something like that.” And I feel bad too that I feel that way, because I know I shouldn’t–especially for a guy who is supposed to be an environmentalist. But I still think it’s true, even if that makes me a bad person or a hypocrite–both of which may well be the case.

I don’t make use of hexagons that much, or as often as I should. But it came up today in a practical problem. The guy running the girls soccer league that I coach in was having trouble coming up with a schedule that kept one team from playing many more games against one opponent than another. A coach in the league said that if you drew a hexagon & had different colored pencils, you could draw lines connecting the vertices in pairs of three and that there were at least five combinations thereof. Which means, following this system, in a 10-game season each time would play any given oponent a total of 10 times. I tried it and it worked. I’m now wondering what else I can do with hexagons.

The whole problem stems from the “hockey mom” statement, for were it not for that Barack Obama might not have made the unfortunate pork reference and the wingnuts might not have been able to claim the moral high ground once again, as they always seem to do. (Don’t get me started.)  If people think you’re calling someone a pig, they might find that offensive. (More likely they’re trying to make other people think that you’re the pig.) Others found Obama’s statement offensive to pigs in general. But no one else, so far as I know, has identified the true source of the problem which lies in the original statement about hockey moms. That insensitive remark, by the redoubtable Sarah P., was blatantly offensive to pit bulls–with or without lipstick.

It may seem as if I am obsessed by blog statistics and that is true. For if I don’t pay attention to how many people are or are not reading this blog who will? (For the record most people are NOT reading this blog ranked 1,941,060 on Technorati.) Still, I’ve had a theory that the less I write, the more people read. Yesterday, for example, a day on which I posted nothing, readership shot up about 50%. Today, because of this post, it’ll likely drop way down. Maybe those numbers are telling me something, if only I were smart enough to figure out what.

Tonight, after the kids fell asleep (after the usual struggled involved thereof), I found myself doing some unusual chores. First I strapped my roller blades on and headed across  town to retrieve my daughter’s bike from a friend’s house. I held the handlebars while I bladed, which wasn’t too difficult except for the fact that the handlebars were so low, I had to crouch way down and was afraid I’d never be able to straighten out my back again.

But I did, which was good because it enabled me to attend to the second  task. My youngest girl had collected snails from around the corner and deposited them in her  terrarium. I decided to take the snails home and walked around the block carrying a box filled with snails. I deposited the snails next to the fence, where we found them, and was on my way. The subsequent chores I attended to–dishes, flossing, etc.–were quite mundane by comparison. And nothing out of the usual happened for the rest of the day.

I saw NIM’S ISLAND with my  six-year-old daughter the other night which is an excellent “family film” in which a father stops at nothing to be reunited with his daughter. I was disappointed after the movie when my daughter said I wasn’t like the dad in the movie. “What do you mean?” I asked, indignantly. “I’d do everything I could to get back to you and the island.” Perhaps that was true, she said. “But you can’t make those spinning things.” Which was a statement to which I had no rejoinder.

Sarah Palin asked the citizens of Alaska to pray with her for a new gas pipeline. I guess that’s a big state with oversized dreams because from where I come from people just pray for parking spaces.

How come John McCain can call Mitt Romney a pig and nobody cares, yet when Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a pig everyone got so hot and bothered? That smacks of a double standard. Or as my youngest daughter used to put it: “That’s not fair!”

It’s not often you experience two firsts on the same visit to the dentists. First I had a dental hygienist who was quiet. Almost every other one I can remember was a compulsive talk (I thought it was a job requirement) and having a quiet one was hard to get used to.

The second thing that happened might have been related to the first. I feel asleep in the dentist’s chair for the first time and only woke up when the hygienest jabbed me in the lip with some plaque-removing implement. You might say I had it coming, dozing off like that in the middle of my cleaning. But in my defense, it was quiet–eerily so–during the procedure. Plus the lights they had on were so bright I had to keep my eyes shut. And then nature took its course, as it inevitably does. Which means that I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Plenty of people fall asleep on the dentist’s chair and live to tell about it.

In my whole life, I’ve never grown a beard or let my beard go more than a couple of days. But while recently staying in my sister’s cabin, which lacked running water, I let it go for more than a couple of days. And to my horror, I saw that my beard was coming in grey, which is something I’d never see before–at least on me. I’m still recovering from that shock, but I can say I’m back to clean-shaven again, this time with more incentive than ever.

I was at an amusement park with the family last week. While my kids were on a mini-rollercoast, a guy came up to me and said: “Excuse me, are you native American?” I told him I was not and that to the best of my knowledge I was of Lithuanian descent. He I looked exactly like people from a tribe in Alabama. If I went there, he said, they would claim me as one of their own.

In his convention speech, Joe Biden referred to the “eight scariest words in the English language: The Vice President’s office is on the phone.” And it will be a relief to get the prince of darkness, Dick Cheney, out of office. But I have to wonder, who is scarier: Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin? On a superficial level, Palin certainly looks better than Cheney. On the other hand, I’d rather have a pit bull without lipstick because then  you never lose sight of exactly what kind of creature you are dealing with.

The Republicans did last night what they do best: dumbing it down. Rudy G. aimed for the lowest common denominator and Sarah Palin went even lower. The only question remains: Are Americans dumb enough to buy it? Some will argue that eight years of George Bush answers that question. But there’s also the hope that people can learn from their mistakes, and, at this point, that’s about the only hope we have.

We took the kids to an amusement park on Labor Day. I don’t love them as much as I used to because many of the rides make me feel sick. I tolerate some of them, just to accompany the kids, but I’m often waiting for them to be over. However, I really did enjoy the old-fashioned rollercoaster they had over they, which goes by the name of Yankee Cannonball. That was great fun, and it was reassuring to know I can still enjoy some of the rides that used to thrill me so much.

No one campaigned harder and less transparently for the vice presidential nomination than our own Mitt Romney. After getting tossed out of the presidential race, he suffered the further humiliation of being passed over in the VP nod. That’s a great disappointment to me. Much as I can’t stand seeing the guy on TV—or hearing his voice over the radio—I wish McCain had picked him because Romney has such “high negatives,” which is another way of saying people hate him.

Don’t get into a wrestling match with a pig, McCain once said of his former opponent. You both get muddy and the pig likes it.

So I guess this is goodbye Mitt. For now, that is. Maybe we’ll see you again in 2012.

I was surprised that at a recent conference event, a very famous (and even legendary) physicist signaled me over to meet his wife. I hadn’t expected that since I’d only talked to him once before, face-to-face, and for only a minute or two at that. He said: “___, this is the guy who keeps sending me all those emails with questions about Calabi-Yau manifolds.”